Klan’s Attempt to Recruit Police Probed : Racism: LAPD confirms some officers received KKK mailings. Gates says he would seek dismissal of any officer who joined the hate group.

Attempts to recruit Los Angeles police officers into a militant Ku Klux Klan group are being investigated by the LAPD’s Anti-Terrorist Division, according to police officials.

A two-page application from the Kansas City, Mo.-based White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan has been received by some LAPD divisions, department spokesman Cmdr. Robert S. Gil confirmed. The investigation was launched after copies of the recruitment literature was shown to the Los Angeles Police Commission on Tuesday.

Lt. Fred Nixon, another department spokesman, said the inquiry was initially launched by the LAPD’s Internal Affairs Division, but it was then handed over to the anti-terrorist squad because of the nature of the klan.

“It’s very distasteful,” Gil said of the KKK mailers. “It represents everything we don’t stand for. . . . We don’t know if any officers are taking it seriously.”

Chief Daryl F. Gates said through a spokesman that if any LAPD officer joins the Ku Klux Klan, “I would charge him with misconduct and I would do my best to fire him.”

The White Knights unit, which was organized in 1989, is “armed, super-militant” and has “a potential for serious trouble making,” according to a report released this year by the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, a Jewish civil rights group headquartered in New York.

According to an intelligence report issued this month by Klanwatch, another KKK watchdog group based in Montgomery, Ala., the White Knights leader, or Imperial Dragon, Dennis Mahon, has been promoting “a heightened stance of militancy.”

In a telephone interview from his Tulsa, Okla., office, Mahon did not deny his group has the potential for violence.

“We’re the most violent klan in America,” he said. “We are trained in counterinsurgency.”

Mahon, 40, said his group, which wears white berets but no robes, has 400 members, more than twice as many as a membership count conducted by the ADL and Klanwatch.

The White Knights, he said, mailed the recruitment applications a couple of weeks ago to several LAPD divisions, to individual officers at the stations and to some officers’ homes.

Thus far, Mahon said, he has received about 50 responses from officers asking for more information. “A handful,” he said, actually returned filled-in applications.

Moreover, he said, “if (cops) see (Police Chief Daryl F.) Gates hammered, you’re gonna see a lotta guys join up.” Mahon was referring to the controversy over whether Gates should resign after the beating of black motorist Rodney G. King by four white LAPD officers.

Mahon’s claim that he has received inquiries prompted ADL and Klanwatch officials to question whether Mahon was attempting to attract publicity.

Irwin Suall, the ADL’s fact-finding director in New York, said he was “very dubious” about any claims Mahon makes about recruiting police officers. Mahon’s group, he said, has been very weak in California.

Danny Welch, director of Klanwatch, said a handful of officers in relatively small police departments have joined KKK units, but added he “would find it hard to believe” that LAPD officers would even correspond with the White Knights.